Sunday Night Journal — January 17, 2010
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple of months or so and have had trouble making the time for it, so I’m going to allocate this week’s journal to it.
Anyone with an interest in American folk music is probably aware of Folkways Records, a company founded in 1948 by Moses Asch which did much to document and preserve the American folk legacy, as well as folk music of other countries. The recordings now belong to the Smithsonian Institution, and the Smithsonian, in collaboration with Moses Asch’s son Michael, is producing (or has produced) a series of 26 hour-long radio programs in which Michael rambles around the Folkways collection playing music and commenting on it. The programs are available as podcasts and can be found here. (Note to the technologically less-than-up-to-date: they’re really just MP3 files which can be downloaded and played with any audio software, e.g. Windows Media Player; the “podcast” paraphernalia just provides some extra conveniences.) I don’t especially like the title of the series, which rather smells of “social consciousness” didacticism, and indeed there is some of that—more on that topic in a minute—but in general this is great stuff.
Each program is organized around some particular theme, and of course some are more interesting than others. I’ve listened to six of them so far, and the most interesting of these has been “The Unfortunate Rake,” which traces the evolution of a folk song from 18th century England to 20th century America. Did you know that the songs “The Streets of Laredo” and “St. James Infirmary” are both descendants of a song called “The Unfortunate Rake”? I had no idea; they have very little in common now.
It’s indicative of…something or other…that although I grew up in the south, which is the source of much of the most memorable American folk music, I knew almost nothing of the real thing until I encountered it in recordings. This began with the pop-folk of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, with groups like the Kingston Trio and the Brothers Four and the Highwaymen. I am indebted to an uncle, one of my mother’s brothers, and his wife for introducing me to music that was much closer to the roots. At first much of this was too rough and ragged for me, but I got over that, and still listen to the music I first heard there, which I can’t say about the Kingston Trio et.al. (though I think some of their music is worthwhile on its own terms, as a variety of pop music).
Much of what I heard at my aunt and uncle’s house was on the Folkways label, and I remember being fascinated by the packaging of the records themselves: they looked crude compared to the products of the big companies, and the notes appeared to have been typed (I mean, on a typewriter) and crudely duplicated. But the jackets were thick and sturdy, as was the vinyl on which the records were pressed. Some of mine are in much better shape than major label LPs that I’ve had just as long and treated no more badly. And the notes were full and factual and interesting. I remember in particular a Furry Lewis record (here) which, as far as I can recall, was my first encounter with slide guitar, which I love to this day. As B.B. King said of hearing Bukka (Booker) White’s slide, “that sound would go all through me.” And it still does. (Listen to the sample of “Pearlee Blues” at the link above.)
The Smithsonian is doing a great, great service by preserving and distributing these recordings and producing shows like “Songs to Grow On.” You can buy CDs and MP3s online, and in the latter case, you can download the liner notes in PDF format, something which very few labels are doing and which deserves particular praise on the part of those of us who like to learn something about the music we’re listening to.
As everyone with any interest at all in the topic knows, the interest in American folk music in the 1940s and ‘50s was predominantly a left-wing phenomenon. Though the authentic artists themselves had no particular political agenda, their urban admirers most certainly did. The Folkways catalog reflects this, sometimes in a pretty heavy-handed way, as does the “Songs to Grow On” series. Some of the material is not “folk” by normal definition, e.g. a program devoted to the Harlem Renaissance. And Michael Asch is pretty obviously a committed leftist. So you have to put up with a certain amount of left-wing propaganda in the programs, and mostly that’s not hard for a non-sympathizer like me to do. It’s well meant, I think, if naïve. But there is one moment of foolishness—to use no harsher term—that requires comment.
It’s toward the end of the first program in the series. Asch is discussing the optimism that followed World War II, the hope that a better world would follow the carnage. But these hopes were not to be realized, he says. I waited for what would come next, the explanation of what went wrong. And I shouldn’t have been surprised when it came, but I was. The answer, according to Asch: the hope for a better world was “a dream dashed with the Red scare.”
Perhaps it was understandable at the time, but there is no excuse for such views today, though I know they are still widely held (see almost any Hollywood treatment of the times). Anyone who can look at what the Soviet Union and China were doing in the years following WWII, or simply to refuse to look at all, and conclude that anti-communism was the great evil of the time is willfully blind. I’m not sure whether such blindness deserves pity or scorn, but it certainly does not deserve respect. It’s like a southerner blaming abolitionists for ruining the old South.
That didn’t stop me from enjoying the rest of the programs I’ve heard, and I’m hoping there won’t be anything else quite as egregious, though I may skip the program devoted to Sacco and Vanzetti.
There is an interesting rundown of the politics of the folk movement in this recent article at First Things. I think it’s factually correct though it exhibits little awareness of the fact that most people who liked this music simply liked the music.
Light On Dark Water 
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